


Triptych

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2017 [11]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Brother/Brother Incest, Buffy happened in the nineteenth century, Community: wishlist_fic, Established Relationship, Feels, Happy Ending, Hurt Sam, Incest, Infidelity, Injury, Monsters, Multi, Not Beta Read, Prompt Fic, Tags Are Hard, Threesome, Timestamp, so many feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 14:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13056063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Dean has a girlfriend, Dean has had a girlfriend the whole time, while Sam's burned in the ceiling, Dean had a girlfriend and he didn't tell Sam.





	Triptych

**Author's Note:**

> For flightsofwhimsy, who asked for a Colt!Verse story with Dean/Buffy/Sam. This was sort of the kick in the rear I needed to finally figure out how to write this bit, because I was super stalled on it. If I ever managed to not have 3787873423 things on my docket, I can now procede to the actual plot I have planned for this verse. Thank you! I hope you enjoy it. 
> 
> Everyone else: This shan't make a lick of sense without reading the previous parts in the series.

+

1

Sam wakes. Sam… well. Sleep is too gentle a word, but passing out is too hard, because he goes away for only moments, pain making him woozy, but he manages to hold on through most of it. 

Whatever that fugly is, it has hellishly wicked claws. It feels like the tips of them might still be embedded in his side. 

In between waking and not-sleeping he hears Dean’s voice. It takes him a long time to figure out his brother isn’t talking to him. “…lay low, just for a while, please. I said I’m sorry…. couldn’t… wanted to… babe, please…. still after us… can’t…love you.”

“W’s’at?” Sam manages, shifting painfully in the passenger seat. 

Dean looks at him, hanging up the phone blindly. “Friend,” he says. He’s worried. Sam tries to smile. Dean grimaces back. 

Dean has friends? Dean has friends he loves? Sam was away too long. His fault. He left. Cut Dean out and left him at sea with only their deadbeat father to cling to. Guilt. Dean won’t even touch him since he’s back. Good for him. Sam deserves it. Keeps hurting the people he loves. Dean lived through it. Jess didn’t. 

He still feels jealous of that friend, though. 

Black again.

Then a flashlight. “Jesus, son, what happened to him?”

Male voice. Dean’s friend? Sam blinks blurry eyes up at the face through the driver’s side window. Uniform. Cop. Why isn’t Dean flooring it?

“Caught a nasty job. Listen, she call the station yet? Something might be tracking us.”

The man nods. “Yeah. We’re doubling up teams, keeping people inside. Sheriff let us all know to stay away from anything weird and give her a call. You sure he doesn’t need a hospital?”

Dean puts on his big grin, the fake one, the one he didn’t wear until now, lies, “Nah. He’ll be fine.”

Sam knows, if he manages to twist enough to look, big brother’s hand would be shaking in his lap. 

Black.

+

2

Sam wakes inside a rainbow. 

But he wakes, which is surprising. He tries to move, agony stabs, he stops. Blinks. Blinks again. 

Not a rainbow. Stained glass windows and morning sunshine. Beautiful. He’s woozy and he suspects both bloodloss and painkillers as the culprits. 

He tries to assess his state anyway. His feet are cold.

“You’re too darn big to fit on my couch and way too unwieldly to lug upstairs. Sorry,” a voice answers. Female. Not the cop. Sam wiggles his toes, finds them swinging free over nothing. Edge of the couch, probably. 

He tries to reconcile stained glass windows with a couch and a female talking to him and decides it’s time to wake up fully and stop muttering to himself. 

He’s inside a church. It takes only a moment to realize that, despite the vastly changed interior. A church that has been made into a living space with a tiny blonde girl sitting across from him, observing him with pursed lips. 

“You alive?” she demands. 

He frowns, rubs at his face. Tries to sit up. Decides not to. 

“Where am I?”

“My place. Dean brought you here. Said you don’t know what’s after you and this is the safest place he knows.” Her smile is… something. Wry, maybe, or hurt. Sam is too exhausted to parse it. 

“You’re his friend.”

This time, he recognizes the thing on her face just fine. It’s grief with a helping of rage. “You’re the reason he hasn’t been home in six months.”

Sam goes back to sleep still trying to fit his mind around ‘home’. 

+

3

“Don’t you think you maybe should have told me you had a girlfriend?” he demands the second the girl – Buffy – is out of earshot. He hisses, low and angry. His side twinges. 

Dean ducks his head, won’t meet his eyes. 

“Dean!”

An angry grunt and then his brother’s up and pacing, hands rubbing over his face. His eyes are closed but he finds his way around the furniture anyway. There’s a pair of his boots by the door and a picture of mom and dad on the side table, next to a bleach blond man in a candid shot with Buffy. 

“How was I s’pposed to do that, Sammy, huh? After-“

He trails off. After Jess died. When Sam, grief stricken and stupid and drunk and lonely crawled into his bed the night of her funeral and Dean let him, with some silent thing in his eyes. Yeah. He guesses there wasn’t a good moment in there to say, “By the way, your girlfriend might be dead, but mine’s just dandy, so get back in your own bed, pervert.”

Dean has never said no to Sam. 

No, not true anymore. 

Before, Dean never said no to Sam. After, he let Sam have that one, drunken, grieving night. Since then, he’s always found a way to keep Sam in his own queen bed and ignore his searching hands. 

Because he has a girl, a woman, someone he loves, and he didn’t want to cheat on her. 

“And after that?” Sam demands. “Did you even tell her what was going on? Or did you shut her out, too?!”

Finally, Dean stops on a dime and a snarl. “She knows, Sammy.” And then, because he can sometimes be a vindictive dick, he adds, “She knows everything.”

And then he storms out, leaving Sam on the couch, too injured to follow, gaping after him. Does that mean – 

+

4

“Dean says you know that I know. Wow, complicated sentence. But, you know. Heh.” She chuckles at her own pun, puts a plate of grilled chicken with a side of salad down on Sam’s lap. She’s not gentle about it, but she avoids his wounded side. 

(In the dying light, she looks a little like Jess.)

(In the dying light, she looks a little like mom.)

Dean has been gone all afternoon to talk to the Sheriff about the thing that clawed up Sam. The Sheriff. Of this town. They are in. He went as himself, too, no suit, no badge. Sam doesn’t understand anything anymore. 

Sam looks away from Buffy, blushing scarlet because doing it is one thing. They have – he has, because Dean never, ever started it – done this for years and years and no-one has ever _known_ before. 

Lovers, yes. Brothers, yes. Both? 

He feels shame and that makes him angry and that makes him guilty in turn. He hates her because he can’t hate Dean and he already spends too much time hating himself. 

“And you’re okay with that?” It’s a challenge. He can’t stop it coming out of his mouth. 

Buffy smiles. It’s a Mona Lisa smile, ancient and patient and Sam wonders how the fuck his brother landed a girl like that. “We all have our sins. Dean reminded me of that.” She shrugs and curls up with her own plate, crunching down on a cherry tomato. “Glasshouse. Stones. You know.”

Then, abruptly, she loses her cheer. “But you left him. You and your dad, you both abandoned Dean like so much trash by the side of the road and I found him and he’s mine now. You don’t get to hurt my man. No-one does. Is that clear? You either stick it out or you get the hell off this ride, because Dean won’t survive it if you string him along and then disappear again. He won’t.”

Sam has no idea what to say to that, beyond his knee jerk reaction of, “Stay the hell out of it,” so he says nothing at all for once. 

Eats his dinner. 

Waits for Dean to come home. 

+

5

“I like her.”

“Mhm?” 

Dean’s tired, just stumbled down from the bedroom, wiping his eyes. He put on coffee, came over to check on Sam. Buffy is asleep upstairs. 

“I like Buffy. Would like her more if she didn’t hate me, but, you know.” (She seems good for you.)

No-one has ever put Dean first. Not even Sam. Especially not Sam. 

“She doesn’t hate you,” Dean argues, with an eye roll. Then settles the subject on, “I think the thing might have actually tracked us here. Gonna check it out today.”

Sam lets him. 

+

6

They leave by nightfall and come back by midnight, Buffy cradled in Dean’s arms, bleeding from her belly, bleeding, bleeding. 

Too deep, too ragged, too far gone and Sam scrambles off the couch to make room even as his own wound flares in agony, limps into the bathroom when Dean calls out directions to the First Aid kit and comes back to Buffy holding his brother’s hands in hers, squeezing.

“No,” he snaps. “no, no, no, fuck no, you need to stop doing that, you need to stop jumping in front of me, I am so fucking tired of this! Buffy!”

She shrugs and freezes at whatever it does to her insides. “Sorry, honey. Can’t help it.”

It’s a declaration of some sort and Sam swallows because his brother’s girlfriend is dying for him and he didn’t even get to meet her, killed her really, because he wasn’t good enough to kill that thing so they had to run, led it here, right to her. 

He drops the kit, grab Dean’s shoulder for support. Gets shaken off as Dean falls to his knees, pressing his lips to her cheek. “Crazy Church Girl,” he whispers.

“I hate that name.”

“No, you don’t.”

She dies.

+

7

Time freezes. 

Sam exhales. 

The ornate doors of the church crash open and something black and fluid, something with eyes like coal and too many teeth comes rushing in like the tide. 

Dean drops onto his ass, doesn’t let go of Buffy’s hand. Makes no move toward his gun. 

The thing (creature, monster, what is it, how does he kill it, what) skids to a halt next to them and coalesces into a dog, a wolf, a fox, something canine, something whining low in an impossible throat. 

Black dog. 

That’s a fucking – 

Dean puts a hand on its head. Makes a shushing noise. “Hey, Eddie,” he whispers, quietly. The thing puts its snout on Buffy’s leg and licks at some of the blood soaked into her jeans. Dean lets it. 

Dean - Sam doesn’t understand anything anymore. His brother least of all.

“What the hell?” he blurts. The black dog snarls at him. Dean soothes it. Dean _soothes it_. 

“We’re in a cemetery, Sammy,” Dean explains, rolls back to his knees. Still doesn’t release Buffy’s hand even as he draws his favorite knife. “Eddie still guards it.”

He releases her, finally, to cut off the rest of her top, cut it off her corpse. Her bra, too. Sam looks away from the bloody, gory mess of it. “Get me some towels, will ya?”

“Dean, what – “

“Towels, Sammy. Now.”

Sam goes.

He returns, gets sent for a bowl of water, watches his brother meticulously clean his girlfriend’s corpse. He puts her insides back inside under the watchful eyes of a monster and then redresses her carefully. No crying. No swearing. No grief-fueled tantrums. He tells Sam not to look when he exchanges Buffy’s panties for non-bloodied ones, but otherwise doesn’t talk. 

Sam watches. Under all the blood, the wound looks almost harmless. Smaller than it should be. 

He inspects his own wound, finds three stitches torn. Ignores it. 

+

8

Two hours and twenty-seven minutes after she died, Buffy gasps back to life with a curse too foul for her mouth. Dean slums. Eddie howls in glee. 

(Sam’s teeth clench with irrational fucking _fury_ at the fact that _Dean_ gets to have a girlfriend who comes back to life and all Sam gets are nightmares of his burning, burning, burning.)

+

9

Two hundred years of hunting and a lonely church surrounded by the dead. A boy and a ghost and a wendigo and another ghost and four years of on-and-off and pictures mingling on the end table and Sam sits and listens and tries to comprehend.

The Dean he remembers, the Dean that was _his_ would have killed her on sight. He would never have befriended her, would never have forgiven her. Wouldn’t have told her about Sam, about – he wouldn’t have – 

That Dean is four years dead and Sam killed him. 

Buffy tells him the whole sordid tale from her favorite armchair, curled around her middle like she can still feel phantom claws, fond expression on her face as she watches Dean putter around the kitchen. 

(Dean cooks. Tomato rice soup. For some reason, those three words make Sam’s throat close up.)

“You love him,” Sam realizes, with an immediacy he hasn’t felt before. They’re an old couple, he understands now, a comfortable one, so he missed the clues, missed the warmth beneath the comfortably worn grooves. 

Buffy loves his brother. Enough to leap into the path of wicked claws for him and die and come back. 

She shrugs, unashamed.

“He loves you, too,” Sam adds and there is a hesitance about her now, a sort of hopeful disbelief. “I can tell.”

Dean has only ever cooked for Sam before. Never tomato rice soup. Never in a kitchen bathed in multi-colored morning light, in a place that was once an altar, a monster sitting at his heels, begging scraps. 

Buffy smiles at Sam then, and in the six days they’ve been here, it’s the first true smile he sees on her, the first unburdened and unconcerned, with nothing behind it but joy. He smiles back with a baby’s reflex and closes his eyes. 

+

10 

“He loves you too, you know,” she tells him, months later, covered in vampire guts and listing into him with the force of her post-hunt jitters, beaming. 

It doesn’t sound angry anymore and Sam looks down at her (golden hair and bright fire and - ) and smiles back, still smiles back, always smiles back and thinks of how Buffy will never die and Dean will never leave her and how he’s a selfish bastard, always has been. 

He hauls her into a one-armed hug, allows, “I know,” and meets his brother’s gaze across the room. 

It feels like a beginning of some sort. 

+


End file.
